The Official Definition: What the NIH Says
The most authoritative starting point for understanding biofield healing is the definition provided by the National Institutes of Health. In 1994, the NIH's Office of Alternative Medicine convened a research panel to establish standardized terminology for energy medicine. They adopted the term biofield to describe the complex field of energy and information that surrounds and permeates the living body.
The NIH's National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) defines biofield therapies as techniques that involve channeling healing energy through the practitioner into the client's energy system to restore normal energy balance and health. The NCCIH recognizes over 200 distinct biofield healing approaches, including Therapeutic Touch, Healing Touch, Reiki, External Qigong, Polarity Therapy, and many others.
The NIH classifies energy medicine into two categories: veritable energy medicine, which uses measurable forms of energy such as electromagnetic radiation, sound, and light, and putative energy medicine, which works with biofields that have not yet been fully characterized by conventional measurement instruments. Biofield healing falls primarily in the putative category — though as measurement technology advances, the line between these categories continues to shift.
"The mechanisms are not fully established. The clinical effects are real and reproducible. Those two things can both be true — and in biofield science, they are."
What the Biofield Is: The 2015 Expanded Definition
In 2015, Dr. Beverly Rubik of the Institute for Frontier Science, Dr. Shamini Jain at UC San Diego, and colleagues published an expanded scientific definition of the biofield in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. They described the biofield as a complex organizing energy field engaged in the generation, maintenance, and regulation of biological homeodynamics.
This definition frames the biofield as active rather than passive — as an organizing principle involved in maintaining biological coherence rather than simply a field produced by biological processes. It encompasses multiple components:
Measurable electromagnetic fields generated by the heart, nervous system, and other organs
Coherent biophotonic emissions from living cells, first documented by German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp
As-yet-uncharacterized subtle energy components that measurement technology has not yet fully captured
This connects the biofield to homeodynamics — the dynamic self-regulatory processes through which living systems maintain internal balance and respond to disruption. If the biofield is genuinely involved in organizing the body's self-healing processes, then interventions that influence the biofield can, in principle, influence those processes.
What Biofield Healing Modalities Actually Do
Across their diverse cultural origins, terminologies, and techniques, biofield healing modalities share a common operational premise: the practitioner, through a specific state of consciousness and intention, influences the client's biofield in ways that support the client's self-regulatory and self-healing capacities.
In Reiki, developed by Mikao Usui in Japan in 1922, this is accomplished through channeling universal life force energy — called ki in Japanese or chi in Chinese — through the practitioner's hands into the client's energy system. In Therapeutic Touch, developed by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz, practitioners use their hands to detect and redirect energy imbalances without physical contact. In External Qigong, practitioners direct chi toward clients through focused intention and movement.
In Shiva Murti healing, developed by Balinese High Priest Ratu Nabe and transmitted through Jero Jason, the practitioner enters a state of dissolution into the unified field, invokes specific divine Shiva and Shakti energies through Balinese Tantric mantra, activates kundalini through breath and specific techniques, and directs the full spectrum of divine healing energy toward the client's biofield with extraordinary precision.
What Clinical Research Shows
Published research on biofield therapies spans over 400 peer-reviewed papers indexed in PubMed and covers a range of conditions and measurement outcomes.
A review published in the Journal of Complementary and Integrative Medicine examined biofield energy therapy studies and concluded that biofield therapy was effective in treating different disease symptoms in preclinical and clinical studies. The proposed mechanism was quantum entanglement through spiritual healing — whereby the healer's quantum thinking and transmission of quantum energy to the subject leads to healing occurring through instantaneous communication at the quantum level.
Research on Therapeutic Touch documents significant effects on wound healing rates, anxiety levels in hospitalized patients, and agitation in patients with dementia. Studies on External Qigong found measurable effects on tumor microenvironment in mouse models. Research on Reiki shows activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, reduction in heart rate and blood pressure, reduced fatigue in cancer patients, and improved quality of life scores in chronically ill populations.
A 2026 study using 1,000 quantum noise generators as biofield sensors during healing sessions found significant deviations from statistical randomness during active healing periods, with fractal analysis confirming increased temporal order in the quantum noise data during sessions. This is among the most direct physical evidence to date of a measurable effect occurring during biofield healing work.
How Shiva Murti Fits Within Biofield Science
Shiva Murti healing is a biofield therapy in the fullest sense. It operates through the practitioner's influence on the client's biofield, using practitioner coherence, specific vibrational inputs via mantra, kundalini activation, and directed intention as the primary tools. It is consistent with the NIH's definition of biofield therapy and with the mechanisms proposed in the scientific literature.
What distinguishes Shiva Murti from most other biofield therapies is its access to the full spectrum of divine energy, its use of kundalini activation, Balinese Tantric mantra as precision vibrational tools, and the depth of its living lineage tracing through Jero Jason to Ratu Nabe and the ancient Balinese Hindu and Hindu Tantric traditions.
"Where Reiki gave me roughly a 50% success rate, Shiva Murti brought that closer to 98%. Sessions that used to take an hour now often complete in twenty minutes."
These distinctions produce clinically measurable differences in outcomes — differences I have tracked personally across twenty years of practice and hundreds of sessions.